by Sanam Maher
“I don’t know why you think this is so extraordinary,” Bodla says curtly. “If a woman was raped, would she bother going to a female police station? Normally men are sitting at the station, and they do the investigation. So what’s the problem?” Those who say the NR3C needs more female officers are simply biased, he argues, and has a theory about such critics. “It’s because there’s a higher class of society involved in cybercrimes.” He laughs. “The lower class would not be involved in using this Facebook stuff. They would bother about having enough food, not about using the Facebook for their friendships. The ones using Facebook or WhatsApp are the class that uses the Internet for their leisure time. And which class is able to have leisure time and access to all these fancy things? So that’s why you think they should be treated in an extraordinary way?”
On my way out of Bodla’s office I pass a man sitting on a wooden chair with a ripped seat by one of the windows in the hall. He has thrown open the window and dangles his feet outside. He’s listening to the latest Bollywood hits on his mobile phone while scrolling endlessly through some social media feed. The music echoes through the corridor, which is lined with shelves crammed with papers. There are expense reports, budget notes, documents with the stamp of the director’s office, and hundreds of brown folders, stacked as tall as a man, bound together with twine and bursting with sheets of paper, yellowing at the edges, some ripped or nibbled away by termites, so long have they been there.
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In August 2016 the government passed the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), a piece of legislation criticized by opposition parties and rights activists as a tool to curb freedom of expression. The law includes punishment for hate speech and recruitment or planning of terrorist acts through online platforms (imprisonment for up to seven years and/or a fine), the dissemination of child pornography (imprisonment for up to seven years and/or a fine of up to 5 million rupees), cyberstalking, intimidation, harassment, or the non-consensual distribution of photographs or videos (imprisonment for up to three years and/or a fine of up to one million rupees), sexually explicit doctored photographs or videos and blackmail for sexual acts (imprisonment for up to five years and/or a fine of up to five million rupees), and the use of another’s identity without permission (imprisonment for up to three years and/or a fine of up to five million rupees).
However, critics of the law, including Nighat, say the language of the act is vague and open to abuse. The section dealing with “spoofing,” for example, would make it an offence to caricature or parody political leaders—this includes memes—resulting in imprisonment for up to three years and/or a fine of 500,000 rupees. Section 10, dealing with hate speech, warns against information shared online that “is likely to advance inter-faith, sectarian or racial hatred” but does not consider that material shared by religious minorities may offend those in a majority. In September 2016, a month after the act was passed, a Christian man named Nabeel Masih was arrested and charged with blasphemy for allegedly sharing a photograph of the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, on social media.14
While the section dealing with cyberstalking could help victims of harassment, it could also implicate citizen journalists who use social media to share videos or photos of wrongdoing or harmful behaviour. The act gives the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to remove or block access to any content online “if it considers it necessary in the interest of the glory of Islam or the integrity, security or defence of Pakistan…public order, decency or morality.”15
State Minister for Information Technology Anusha Rahman said in 2016 that the act could not be changed “on the whims and wishes of a few NGOs,” and she dismissed critics as having an agenda against the government. “Every day, dozens of complaints are launched by those who are targeted online,” she argued in the National Assembly. “And there have been cases where young girls have committed suicide, therefore, the government cannot let all this happen just like that.” The matter was not up for discussion. PECA, its supporters insisted, was there to protect the daughters of Pakistan. And were it not for the body of a young woman, found hanging in her room at one of Sindh’s largest universities four months after the legislation was passed, it would have been at least possible to believe this.
On 31 December 2016, a few days before classes resumed at the University of Sindh in Jamshoro, a twenty-two-year-old postgraduate student named Naila returned to the campus. She had travelled there from her home in Qambar, about 300 kilometres away. At the time only a handful of girls were at the hostel where Naila lived. The warden, one of five students charged with watching over the hostel’s residents, was curious about why Naila had returned from vacation early. Naila said she was worried about her thesis, which was due soon, and wanted to have some quiet time to work on it. A student at the university’s Institute of Sindhology, Naila was writing about the romantic poetry of the Sufi scholar Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai.
Marvi Hostel is home to 1,600 girls who live there for a paltry 3,500 rupees a year. They come to the university from towns and villages across the province and some also from homes in provinces abutting Sindh. Every year the university receives a flood of requests for accommodation. It is the only hostel for undergraduate and postgraduate girls on campus, and although enrolment has increased from 16,000 to 32,000 students in the last decade, no new hostels have been built to accommodate the growing numbers. There are up to 8,000 girls at the University of Sindh, and for many a place at Marvi Hostel is the only way they will be allowed to leave their homes for university. One official at the hostel estimated that sixty girls were often crammed into a space built to house thirty. Beds are squeezed in a few inches apart, and many girls share a single bed with friends.
Some time after 8 p.m. on the day she came back to the hostel Naila told the warden she wasn’t feeling well. She wanted to see a doctor. It was past the time that girls were allowed to leave the premises alone, and if someone was ill, the warden had to accompany them. The warden told Naila that she would call a car and go with her to a doctor. Naila changed her mind. I’m just feeling a bit weak, she reportedly said. Perhaps I should order some food. Two burgers were delivered to the hostel. The police found the boxes in the dustbin outside Naila’s room the next day, along with two empty strips of sleeping pills. The warden told four or five girls on Naila’s floor to keep an eye on her, as she wasn’t feeling well. The girls invited her to stay in their room, but Naila refused. She said she was fine.
When the warden did her rounds the following day, there was no answer from Naila’s door. She thought she might be sleeping and tried to open the door. It was locked. The rooms on this floor all have a narrow window, almost level with the top of the door, and the warden pushed her hand through the bars of the window and pulled the curtain to one side. She stood on the tips of her toes and peered in. The room was dimly lit. The curtains of the other window were closed. She couldn’t see Naila on her bed. Then she noticed the slightest movement, a gentle swaying in the centre of the room—a body hanging from the fan.
By the time the warden reached the provost’s home, located on the other side of the hostel’s grounds, she was panting and sobbing. She could barely speak. She kept clutching at her neck. She drank some water and then blurted, “A girl is hanging in the room.”
A police officer was summoned. It took him two or three tries to break open the door. It had been locked from the inside with a deadbolt at the top. There was no other way into the room. The only other window opened on to a sheer drop to the ground.
The officer untied the blue and pink dupatta knotted around Naila’s neck and lowered her body on to the bed below. A chair had been kicked to the side. The top button of Naila’s black shirt, embroidered with hot-pink flowers at the neck, had been wrenched off. Her thesis was on the desk, along with her phone. There was no note. Naila’s phone had been wiped clean of all messages, photographs, videos, or notes.
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sp; While the police were searching the room, the phone rang. When one of the officials answered it, there was only silence at the other end. The caller hung up and then quickly sent a text message: “Sorry, wrong number.” But the number had been saved in the phone along with the name of the caller: Anis Khaskheli. The police would find that number frequently on Naila’s call records over the last three months. “When we went to arrest [Khaskheli], he told us, ‘I knew you would come for me,’ ” said Khadim Rind of the Hyderabad police at a press conference a week later. “‘I was waiting for you.’ ”
Khaskheli was a lecturer at a school nearby. He had befriended Naila on Facebook a few months ago. “You will be amazed to know that this is a murder,” Rind said sombrely at the start of the press conference. “Khaskheli trapped Naila for three months. He did it very, very slowly. He spoke to her about love and told her he wanted to marry her. And then, when Naila said she was going to be done with her Master’s and this was the time to marry, he refused.” Naila, the police said, was not the only girl Anis was talking to at the time. “There are thirty other girls that we know of,” Rind said. “Anis took nude pictures of them and he would blackmail them to get more pictures.” The data recovered from Anis’s phone was still being decoded. There could be more girls, Rind warned.
At the hostel the news was met with disbelief. Photographs of Naila, particularly one in which she is clutching a large mobile phone, were shared on Facebook among the students, along with tributes from friends and classmates. She was a pretty girl with a round face and a penchant for doing her hair in a beehive. She was “modern.” She wore short kameezes, jeans and heels. She streaked her hair and dyed it for her brother’s wedding. She liked to be fashionable. She was intelligent and had won awards for her work at the university. She loved Bhittai’s verses and could rattle off his poems. Some of the girls refused to believe she could have been in a relationship with Anis. She may have killed herself because she was anxious about her thesis, they said. But those who have seen the thesis agree that it was well written and as good as any of Naila’s other work.
Someone leaked a video of the police officer breaking into her room. In the video she is visible hanging from the ceiling.
Then the rumours started. Naila would share romantic poetry on her Facebook page and tag her professor in the posts. What kind of girl does that? Her family was uneducated and conservative. They wanted to marry her off as soon as she was done with university. She had pleaded with the hostel warden to help her find a job, so she did not have to return to Qambar. She killed herself because her family had insisted on an arranged marriage. But, as some girls pointed out, if her family was so conservative, would they really have sent their daughter to university in another city?
“She was proudy,” one hostel official said. A haughty girl who wanted to be independent and shut the door in the warden’s face when she suggested she might like to stay in a room with some of the other girls instead of sleeping alone on that last night. She killed herself when Anis, a “hanky panky playboy type guy,” threatened to share her photos with others because “that would have ruined the image she had built of herself at the hostel.”
There was gossip that Naila had four or five more SIMs in her purse, that she was one of those girls who didn’t have just one boyfriend, but three or four. At the hostel some alleged these girls were “running a business.” A bus ticket found in her room revealed that Naila had left her home in Qambar on the twenty-seventh, but arrived at the hostel on the thirty-first. Where had she been during those three days?
The rumours persisted. Naila had given the hostel officials an incorrect phone number for her parents, so they could not be contacted if she stayed out too late or did something against the rules. Some even said she was pregnant.
Deputy Inspector General Khadim Rind insisted that all photographs, videos and messages recovered from Naila and Anis’s phones had been strictly safeguarded. “No one has seen them, other than the superintendent and myself,” he said. “We used our own laptops to download the data and then we sat at home and made printouts of all of the communication.” But there were some on campus, including professors and the officials at Marvi Hostel, who said they had seen the pictures Khaskheli had. In many of them, one woman said, Naila was naked. She seemed to be unaware that she was being photographed.
The university has tightened security at the hostel since Naila’s death. The hostel provosts have created a network of “volunteers” who keep an eye on the girls. An old, unmanned gate into the hostel has been sealed. Any girl entering or leaving Marvi Hostel must now enter her details in a register at the gate and inform two women sitting there about where she is going. If she says she is going somewhere with her family, one of the provosts will wait outside the gate with her to see who picks her up. If a girl stays out past 9 p.m. she must write a letter apologizing to the hostel officials and her parents are contacted. “Many of these girls have left their villages or towns for the first time when they come here,” explains a deputy provost. “Their minds are so fresh. They need a positive environment so they can stay on the right path.”
But not everyone agrees that curbing the girls’ physical movement is the solution to the problem. “I don’t allow my daughters to even sit on a bike with their brother if they are leaving the house,” says the university’s vice chancellor, Dr Fateh Muhammed Burfat. “It’s not about what I feel—it’s the culture we live in. The person on the road has no idea that the boy you’re riding around on a bike with is your brother. That is the environment that a majority of our female students come from. But then they arrive at university and see girls talking to boys or sitting on benches with boys in the gardens. The rich sons of landlords follow the girls in their cars or chase them, or they throw pieces of paper with their phone numbers written on them into the girls’ laps. The girls have never experienced this. They can get confused.”
On Facebook groups that have been shut down and re-created several times under different names, students can post anonymous messages about girls or boys they are interested in and provide their phone number. One page, with more than 5,000 followers, is called Sindh University Crushes and Confessions. “Assalam-o-alaikum, dear admin, don’t show my name,” reads one message. “My confession: there’s a girl in the Physics department, I think she’s in the first year, and she was wearing a black outfit the other day. You were sitting in front of me in the last seminar. You were preparing for the exam and I couldn’t stop looking at you. You looked at me a few times. You must have understood by now who I am. Your eyes are beautiful. I like you. Please contact me.”
Marvi Hostel does not have Wi-Fi and the network in the university does not allow access to Facebook or WhatsApp. While only some of the students own their own laptops through government schemes or awards, almost all have mobile phones with a 3G connection. “I am not running a jail here,” says Dr Burfat. “I can’t take away their phones, but the most we can ask is that they turn off the ringer and not take calls after a certain time. But if a girl is lying in her bed at night and chatting with someone, how can we control that? Some of the girls are so secretive about their relationships, that even a friend sleeping next to her will have no idea she’s talking to a boy.” A common trick, girls at the hostel say, is to answer your phone with the words, “Yes, Mother?”
Dr Burfat says he has seen the pictures in Naila’s case. “You would not send such pictures to your parents, who you have known your whole life,” he says. “So why are you sending them to a man you have known for three months? The girls here need to understand that they should not do anything that would bring them shame. Today they are in the university, but tomorrow they will have to go back to their villages, right? University life is one thing, but life in the village and what is accepted there is completely different.”
The provosts at the hostel know the security system is not foolproof when it comes to keeping tabs on the students. “I can te
ll them when to leave and when to come back, and I can tell them when to be in their rooms, but once they turn on their phones, they could be anywhere they want to be,” a deputy provost says.
In 2016 DRF held a digital security training session at the university and also spoke to the female students about harassment and blackmail online. A month after Naila’s body was found, the university held another session: “Women protection and laws against women harassment.” A professor who was at the event said that only two hundred or so girls attended.
At the session Dr Burfat announced that a cell would be created at the university where girls could report any harassment. “I am like the father of all female faculty and students and will make sure that they stay safe and secure,” he told the students. One provost at the hostel was sceptical about the cell or any platform to report harassment or cybercrimes. “You need a lot of courage to approach someone and show them messages or pictures exchanged with your boyfriend,” she said. “Only a very bold girl, or a girl who isn’t worried about the news getting back to her family or being called a ‘bad girl,’ would come forward. For others, it will take time. We just aren’t there yet.”
Sindh Inspector General of Police A. D. Khowaja also spoke at the seminar. He advised female students not to write anything on social media or in a message that they could not show to their brothers or fathers. No one would dare to blackmail them if they followed this advice, he said.
Some officials at the university argue that only the girls can safeguard themselves. “Look at this,” exclaims a deputy provost at the hostel, waving her hand in the air. “Do you hear anything?” She claps her other palm to her hand. “Did you hear that?” She clasps both hands together and claps again. “Something can only exist when two people are involved.” She waves one hand in the air. “One on its own cannot do anything. And a woman—a good woman—is like a mountain. You cannot move her for anything. Until she shows some weakness, no man can touch her or send her an inappropriate message or anything.”